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I'm not a lawyer but if this gets any traction Apple's gonna get big mad about the branding, aren't they? They're basically swiping original Mac advertising campaign wholesale.

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"hello" doesn't show up in https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/trademark/... which probably makes it much easier.

> The following is a non-exhaustive list of Apple’s trademarks and service marks. [...] The absence of a product or service name or logo from this list does not constitute a waiver of Apple’s trademark or other intellectual property rights concerning that name or logo.

So the idea is that Apple might have a trademark on the word Hello in cursive?

Like I said, I'm not a lawyer, but: yes, I would claim that Apple has a trademark on the word "hello", entirely in lowercase cursive, in that very particular cursive typeface, with a animation that shows it being written out at precisely that speed and in precisely that manner, as a means of promoting a distinctive graphical computer operating system, in a manner that they've continued to reference for the past 40 years [0], yes.

Not a lawyer though.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGrxGQUPqxk

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses

Do you think Apple BSD licensed the iconic Macintosh "hello" image or something?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/01/24/apple-launched-ma...

No I meant this is under BSD, and they aren’t even selling it.

Releasing something for free, whether as in beer or as in freedom, doesn't give you carte blanche to violate trademark law. For just one example (well...hundreds), look at the multitude of fangames Nintendo has shut down [0].

[0] https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/01/nintendo_issues_ma...

As much as I disagree with OP, copyright law is not trademark law.

It's true that trademark is what's at play here, although either way - giving something a BSD license doesn't mean you can use it to violate others' copyright OR trademarks.

Yes, but HelloSystem will never go anywhere because it's BSD.

The canary in the coal mine will be the Elementary Linux distro's Pantheon desktop which even uses the Command symbol ⌘ yet claims "resemblance to any other graphical environment is purely coincidental".

There was some other Mac-copy Linux distro who Apple did send a C&D to for similar reasons but I can't remember the name.

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